14 DAY TRIAL // Mojang this week offers Minecraft 1.7.10 pre-release, the first snapshot of the upcoming major release featuring Realms updates, a player activity monitor, and several other new additions that will delight avid players of the sandbox crafting/survival game.
“We just published a pre-release version of Minecraft 1.7.10 that contains updates for Realms. All Realms related modules were moved into a separate library,” reads a post on the official Mojang blog.
“How does this release affect you? If you are not playing on Realms, it does not change anything at all. The main advantage is that we don’t have to release new updates for Minecraft 1.7.x in the future, if we want to add new features to Realms.”
New Realms features include a player activity monitor, access to more server settings, improvements in the Realms user interface, several bug fixes based on user feedback as well as internal testing, and miscellaneous tweaks that hardcore players will undoubtedly notice.
According to the official Minecraft gamepedia page for the 1.7.10 release, “all Realms-related modules were moved into a separate library [and] future additional features to Realms will not require new updates for Minecraft 1.7.x.”
Mojang explains how to download this first build of Minecraft 1.7.10 through the built-in launcher:
“To get snapshots, open your launcher and press the ‘New Profile’ button. Call it ‘snapshots’ and check the box saying ‘Enable experimental development snapshots’ and save. To switch to the normal version, you can select it in the dropdown at the bottom left corner of the launcher. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (See the ‘new profile’ dialog). Snapshots can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds.”
As usual, both Mac and Windows users will download a cross-platform server .jar file, while the game client is available for download at the links below. The same goes for Linux gamers.
Minecraft requires at least Java 1.6 and around 1 GB of system RAM to run properly. The game client sells for €19.95 / $27 in its full-featured form, but interested gamers can download the demo and have a go at it before paying anything. The game has been heralded as the best of its kind, and it is also available on mobile platforms in the form of Minecraft - Pocket Edition.
Download Minecraft 1.7.10 Pre-Release 1 for Mac OS X